@princec
Have you see Elementary OS? It’s very neat. http://sourceforge.net/projects/eosbuilds/
Gotta go Linux Mint… Ubuntu beneath, good UI.
Which is quite different from being evil. IHMO there becomes a problem with over-usage of hyperbole. First some people will come take it literally. You can looking at anti Steve Jobs and Bill Gates comments as well as Apple/MS to easily see this. The second is that it begins to rob the word in question (in this case evil) of any meaning. And even worse, it fosters a spirit in people whom buy into the hype literally to never engage in any meaningful self-criticism or critical thinking. Call me crazy, but I like people to be able to genuinely think for themselves and make informed decisions.
I wish I was so desperate.
Since I’m totally anal, I would disagree with the wording as per my comments above (otherwise, right-on). All humans, to a greater or lesser extent, are motivated by self-interest. Corporations, since they are controlled by humans, amplify the worst of the management team and behave like spoiled self-interested children. It becomes worse when the company is publicly held as the share-holders have to kept happy. I would reserve “evil” for those companies that knowingly cause death, true misery, increased poverty, raping natural resources, etc in the same vein just make a few extra bucks. So companies beating each other up, to me, is like kids fighting on the playground. If one of the kids is too big, a teacher should step in and break it up (i.e. some governmental agency).
While this is very much a problem, again tech-companies really don’t do much of this kind of badness to my knowledge.
Great examples of N a z i companies. Don’t forget the car manufactures that ignore defects because settling death-related law suits is cheaper than a recall.
See previous.
If your going to freelance, then expect to work much more than EA staff members and you’re trading 1 boss for many…all of whom expect you to be an always available slave. (Actually I love it and don’t think I’d ever go back to working for someone else).
If you haven’t tried linux before and want to give it a spin, then use virtualbox. There’s only so much you can say about cherry-red toaster vs. chrome plated toaster.
Please no such detailed information next time.
Actually, just switched the other way and have no regrets. Give the new Ubuntu some time. Took me a little while to get used to it, but I’d say it’s now the most productive desktop I’ve used. In particular, it’s great for keyboard driven stuff (Dash search, HUD, etc.) I don’t like the way Mint seem to forget LTS releases and not fix annoying bugs - I have no intention of upgrading every 6 months!
I agree. Nothing wrong with self-interest - enlightened self-interest is even better! However, if you want to decide whether Microsoft is evil, maybe look at some of their ‘charitable’ dealings (Heartland Institute, etc.) or some of the more self-serving work of the Gates Foundation.
That type of broad anti-business sentiment is politically left. That mindset is the basis for governments like the former Soviet Union or Che/Castro in Cuba, Sandinistas in Colombia, or Chavez in Venezuela.
The institution of business is fundamentally about providing some good or service for money. That’s not inherently evil any more than gravity. Government is fundamentally about having power over others. Science is fundamentally about the accumulation of knowledge. Any of these large institutions can help or hurt people and can make people happy or sad.
Saying “business is evil” is dumb. It doesn’t effectively communicate any idea or concepts, it just dumbs down larger concepts into vague and hotly emotional mush.
Regarding Monsanto: The green revolution (genetic engineering of crops) has saved the lives of billions of people in third world nations by providing more food and saving people from starvation and boosting people out of near-starvation levels of bare sustenance. There are nuggets of legitimate grievances related to certain lawsuits and patent issues that Monsanto has engaged in, but overall, summarizing a large company like Monsanto as simply evil is just a lazy, effortless way to avoid any serious thought or analysis and dumb things down to simple emotions.
Often people like simple hero & villain narratives to everything, but those are usually completely inaccurate.
Have you tried xMonad? If you want a clear/consistent platform wide UI, that’s not what Linux is about. If you want a clean, lean, fast, no-nonsense OS to run your favorite command line and cross platform tools, Linux is perfect.
Yep, you have to get used to Unity what can take some time, probably few weeks. But afterwards it’s really productive, because it’s fast (especially if you use the keyboard often) and actually well designed.
ROFL … :
billions? I cry hyperbole. Come on! If you’d said millions I might have let you get away with that statement, though I’d probably still not believe you. Billions would mean that every person who’s ever eaten GM crops has had their life saved.
I have a general distrust for GM, the same as I have for nuclear power, and many other things - mainly because I believe human beings are a damn sight more stupid than they give themselves credit for. At the same time, we’ve been tinkering with the genes of plants and animals for millennia, so it’s hardly that much different.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57459357/gm-grass-linked-to-texas-cattle-deaths/
(Note: despite the title, the grass was not genetically modified, but was a ‘normally’ bred/crossed grass since 1992)
My point is, more or less, that even this ‘safe’ way of tinkering with plants, can result in unexpected nasty side effects. Maybe it’s simply a lost cause to expect either old methods or GM being safe - at all times. We just have to take calculated risks, like in any part of our lives.
However, Monsanto is just nasty enough to consider it evil. They absolutely knowingly ruin the lives of many farmers, for their own profit.
Having said that: what chemical company is producing the bee-killing pesticides again, that’s risking the collapse of the entire global ecosystem? They should be nominated to be extraordinary evil.
Oh, and I’m still running Vista & Windows 7: I don’t quite get why people seem to vastly like the latter over the former. It’s not that different in your typical workflow, except for the taskbar.
At the risk of derailing the thread further (but who doesn’t love watching a good train wreck) … I’m going to take issue with a paean that credits Monsanto with being the benefactors of an unqualified Billions-with-a-B, but yeah, point taken about hyperbole. I simply rattled off three companies off the top of my head that might possibly have a moral compass wobblier than an entertainment software company. The three I named hardly constitute a triumvirate of brooding, cackling evil to be fended off with invocations and rituals, no. Belief in something as simple and primal as “Evil” tends to require an agency of evil, and I’m too grown up to believe in evil spirits. Verdict’s still out on Dick Cheney though.
And with that, I’m done talking about corporate morality. Back to OS and desktop bashing. If Unity isn’t the code avatar of pure evil, I don’t know what is 
F6X9KcrXHwg
From Wikipedia: “These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation.”
Sure, some people argue with those stats, and it’s hard to prove what kind of famines would or wouldn’t happen. The world population has approximately doubled over the past fifty years. Now it is about seven billion. If we weren’t able to increase crop yields through GM techniques, I don’t see how else that growth could have been accommodated.
Corn is a completely man made crop created by the native americans. It’s creation allowed massive population growth among the native americans. Today’s GM crops seem like a logical modern extension of this.
Interesting story. I wasn’t actually trying to imply that the old way was safe, just that we’ve been doing it longer. We have a rich history of screw ups!
How dare you mention your OS in a thread about … :persecutioncomplex: … oh, wait … ;D
Green Revolution and genetic engineering of crops are not the same thing (though you could consider the latter part of / an extension of the former).
Downloading Mint with Cinnamon… slightly annoyed between having to choose between one or the other desktop with no real idea why there’s a choice but there we go. I shall post my experiences shortly…
Cas
You choose what you like more and what fits well with your way of work. I know, as a Windows user living in a communistic country with no choice, it’s really hard to understand that you can choose and customize a desktop environment.
To Cinnamon. The thing is not really recommended for a Java developer, it freezes when you try to start a Java app. I would still recommend Ubuntu with Unity, just try it a little longer. Try to work with it for few days, e.g. try to configure Ubuntu, install some apps (from repository or PPAs), use them, try Java development etc.
What remarks? Examples please.
Unless I’m mistaken, you’re refering to princec here.
Maybe he was talking about himself? I don’t recall the US being a communistic country :persecutioncomplex:
EDIT: Apparently, I thought Cas lived in Cali ;D
[quote=“Riven,post:299,topic:39083”]
No, to all Windows users. 
Yes, I’m from Cuba, well german Cuba… ;D Never heard of metaphors?